Manchester City's defeat to Brentford on Saturday may have been a shock on paper but their drop-off in form in recent weeks has made such a loss inevitable.
At the start of the campaign, City were blowing sides away. In their first nine Premier League matches of the season, they grabbed 33 goals but in the five since that has shrunk to just seven. If you cast your mind back to the last time Pep Guardiola's side really played well, you'd probably land on the 4-0 win over Southampton or the 6-3 destruction of neighbours Manchester United a week earlier. Those were back in early October and since then that early spark has been snuffed out.
A tight loss to Liverpool was the instigator and though City responded well with three wins afterwards none of the performances were really convincing. They were rattled by Brighton but had Erling Haaland to grab crucial goals. Without him, they needed an excellent Kevin De Bruyne free-kick to get past Leicester and then when the Norwegian returned it took a last-gasp penalty to get past Fulham.
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Those games were intersected with goalless draws at FC Copenhagen and Borussia Dortmund. While red cards in some matches, injuries and the approaching World Cup have been mitigating factors, City have repeatedly been getting away with less-than-stellar displays that have covered over some concerning cracks.
The defeat to Brentford has been coming. It wasn't a fluke. The Bees were the better side and should have been far ahead before they eventually got their own late winner. City were bereft of ideas for the majority of the match and were reduced to pointless shots from distance that never looked to trouble their opponents' goal.
The break for the World Cup has come at a great time for the Blues. Not only does it halt the momentum of their current title rivals Arsenal and Newcastle, but it gives Guardiola a much-needed breather to assess what has been going wrong.
Perhaps he will land on two selection decisions of his that have become a bit perplexing in recent weeks. Despite praising Jack Grealish highly for his display against Chelsea in the Carabao Cup and making it seem that the playmaker had finally grasped what was wanted of him, he was named on the bench once again on Saturday. The third time in the last six league games.
In City's last spell of great form, it looked as though Grealish, Erling Haaland and Phil Foden were becoming the side's new best front three, yet they haven't started together since the Manchester derby. Obviously, Guardiola has plenty of talent at his disposal and likes to rotate to keep things fresh, but to bring that budding relationship to a screeching halt has proved counter-productive.
Grealish hasn't been getting as many goals and assists as he may like but he has been a crucial part of building attacking patterns when City have been at their best. It's of little surprise that they have won every game in which he has featured in the league, with the two draws and two defeats both coming when he wasn't involved.
City have lost an edge going forward and this coincided with the splitting up of the front three that had been serving them well and Grealish's unstable spot in the side.
Ruben Dias also appears to be out of favour at present. The centre-back, who has been such a rock for the last two seasons, hasn't started in any of the last three league games, instead being used in the Carabao Cup and Champions League dead rubbers.
It's not as though Nathan Ake, John Stones, Manuel Akanji or Aymeric Laporte have had particularly bad seasons but it's also hard to pinpoint where Dias, City's best defender since he arrived, has gone wrong to slip down the pecking order. His height and strength were severely missed vs Brentford as Thomas Frank targeted the aerial frailty of Stones and Akanji to costly effect.
Guardiola now has a lot of time to stew on the loss and City's poor performances. Reinstating Grealish and Dias to the starting XI may be the first step in getting things back on track.
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